Stop Trying to Make the Right Decision. Start Making the Decision Right

If you were flying from Auckland to New York and didn’t account for a 20 kilometre crosswind, and simply let the aircraft fly itself, you could end up approximately 600 kilometres off course.

That’s not because the original flight plan was wrong. It’s because conditions change, and small, ongoing adjustments are required to stay on track.

Decisions work in a similar way.

We often spend a huge amount of time trying to find the perfect starting point. The “right” decision. The one that will play out exactly as planned.

The problem is, that decision doesn’t really exist.

If you think about most things that have worked out well, they rarely started out perfectly formed. More often than not, they began somewhere reasonable and were adjusted along the way. And yet, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get it right before we begin. Which, quite often, just delays or completely stops us from beginning at all… while telling ourselves we’re being thorough.

I remember coming across a line from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer that captures this nicely. Instead of focusing on making the right decision, focus on making the decision right.

It’s a great perspective shift. Because the reality is, we never get to see how the alternative would have played out. We can’t run both versions of our lives and compare the outcomes. And yet we often find ourselves assuming the other option would have been better.

Which, when you think about it, is a fairly confident conclusion based on very little evidence. It may just as easily have been worse.

Take something like booking a holiday. You can spend weeks discussing it, trying to find the perfect destination, the perfect route, the perfect timing. Which can very quickly turn into no decision at all. Then the only thing you are waving goodbye to is another year without a holiday. Or you can just make a call, and then put your energy into making it a great experience once you’re there.

I see the equivalent in work situations all the time. Conversations that keep circling in the search for getting it exactly right, when in reality, they’re just delaying progress. Not only that, people are getting frustrated and the lack of progress starts to contaminate the organisation.

The better approach is to accept that most decisions aren’t fixed.

There’s a similar idea Jeff Bezos talks about at Amazon, where he describes decisions as either one-way doors or two-way doors. Most decisions, he argues, are two-way doors. You can walk through them, try something, and if it doesn’t work, you can adjust or come back.

In reality, very few decisions are truly one-way doors. Outside of the genuinely irreversible or catastrophic, most things can be changed, adapted, or improved. The mistake most of us make is treating far too many decisions as permanent, which is what slows us down or stops us progressing.

If something isn’t working, you can adjust it. Change direction. Improve it. Most decisions are far more flexible than they feel in the moment.

Where we tend to get stuck is looking sideways. Replaying the decision. Wondering if we should have done something else. In many ways, that’s just perfectionism dressed up as reflection and it’s not useful.

That doesn’t mean skipping the thinking altogether. Due diligence matters. But there comes a point where more thinking doesn’t improve the decision, it just delays or stops it.

And at that point, the more useful question becomes:

What would it look like to make this decision right from here?

For smaller, low-stakes decisions, there’s also something to be said for just choosing and moving. Not every decision needs a  strategic review. Ellen Langer even suggests that for low-impact choices, there’s very little downside in deciding quickly, even somewhat randomly, and then committing to making it work.

There are no guarantees, of course.

But in my experience, it’s a far more effective way to move forward than waiting for certainty that never quite arrives.